If you are trying to make sense of the seismic changes going on all around us in society, sociologist Robert Nisbet tied it all together in his classic work “The Quest for Community.” It’s not a light read, but it is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how to maintain a free society. It’s a prescient work, and it helped me understand where so much of the alienation and eerieness of this current election cycle has come from: the brokenness of civil society, the continuing dissolution of strong community ties.

I find it fascinating that Nisbet was writing about the breakdown of community and alienation back in 1953. This was half a century before Robert Putnam wrote “Bowling Alone” and 60 years before Charles Murray examined the devastating effects of family breakdown on community in his 2012 work “Coming Apart.”

As the ties that bind people together fall away — family, church, civic societies and private associations– alienation and loneliness in society grow. But Nisbet noted that as this happens, the strong human impulse for community would remain. We would merely grope around for a substitute. So as social brokenness grows, people turn to the government to replace those ties.

It’s so bleak to consider all of this, because it’s happening with ever greater speed before our very eyes. Worse, too many people cannot comprehend the irony of it all: dependence on the mass state only leads to even greater atomization of the individual. Even greater alienation. Is there anything cuddle-worthy in the mass bureaucratic state? Absolutely nothing. All it can deliver is even greater loneliness.

Here’s an excerpt from Nisbet’s Preface, dated December 1952:

“The real significance of the modern State is inseparable from its successive penetrations of man’s economic, religious, kinship, and local allegiances, and its revolutionary dislocations of established centers of function and authority. These, I believe, are the penetrations and dislocations that form the most illuminating perspective for the twentieth-century’s obsessive quest for moral certainty and social community and that make so difficult present-day problems of freedom and democracy.”

And in the preface to the 1970 edition, Nisbet noted this about youth and apathy:

“It has become steadily clearer to me that alienation is one of the determining realities of the contemporary age. . . By alienation I mean the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility. The individual not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it. For a constantly enlarging number of persons, including, significantly, young persons of high school and college age, this state of alienation has become profoundly influential in both behavior and thought.”

Wow. And that was 45 years ago! Think about the mass cluelessness all around us today. Think about students’ utter lack of knowledge of history, of civics, of the humanities. Consider the lack of connection they must be feeling as they grope about, trying on all sorts of personas whether it’s a new gender identity persona or the persona of “social justice warrior.” The divorce culture has rendered more than half of all children in today’s America the wards of broken homes. Sure, children can be resilient. But they so often feel broken and alienated as a result of the disruption in their ties with parents. It takes its toll. Pathologies abound while folks scramble to find safe haven in the State.

And here’s the catch: at the same time that the state gives free stuff to individuals, it takes away from the individual’s personal relationships and associations. As those relationships continue to weaken, State power grows. Let’s not forget that our families, our institutions of faith, our civic and private associations have always served as buffer zones balancing the freedom of the individual against the power of the state. We’ve no choice but to defend and rebuild them.

Few people have considered my thesis which is stated in the title above. Most assume the transgender movement is just a simple matter of protecting from discrimination a tiny demographic — .03 percent of the population who consider themselves transgender. Far from it. When you consider the enormous degree of state-sponsored censorship that is required by the movement — and the punishments meted out to people of conscience by each and every one of the laws its activists seek to pass — a far different story reveals itself.

Last week I spoke about all of this to an audience at the Family Research Council in Washington. You can watch the video by clicking on this link:

My goal was not to discuss the finer points of “gender identity” and what being transgender means for any particular individual. Instead, I focused on the broader and bigger picture of what the transgender ideology means for society at large. Transgenderism is an ideology that is based on the presumption that all human beings have something called a “gender identity that may or may not match the sex they were assigned at birth.” Notice how the word “assigned” is used to hide the reality that your biological sex is based in physical reality. This premise is written into every gender identity non-discrimination law. It basically aims to legally erase male and female sex distinctions. It applies universally — to each and every one of us.

The implications are vast — for our language, for our relationships, for preserving a free society. There can be no question that all of the gender identity anti-discrimination laws amount to little more than censorship laws, intended to modify everybody’s behavior and everybody’s language on pain of punishment.

So, in short, the transgender movement is operating as a vehicle for conformity of thought. And in the end, that means it is a vehicle for dismantling freedom – in the name of freedom – and for building the power of the State. In the end, it puts laws into place that abolish the right to free expression and suppress independent thought. The power of the state enters that vacuum, as it always does under such circumstances.

I’ve identified four features of the transgender movement that serve as indicators of its role as a vehicle for state centralization of power:

Transgenderism is such an extreme form of individualism that accommodating it in law will only create a vacuum for State power. By its very nature it demands that an individual’s inner sense of reality trump any commonly held understanding of reality. This makes it unsustainable. Its extreme individualism demands the breakdown of society’s mediating institutions – such as family, faith, and private associations — that serve as buffer zones that protect the individual from State meddling.

Transgenderism sows chaos into the language, requiring us all – universally and without exception – to accept a seismic change in the definition of what it means to be human, and what relationships mean, particularly family relationships. Freedom of speech and association are casualities.

It requires a very aggressive program of censorship in order to sustain itself and prop up its illusions over any commonly understood reality.

It depends on a very aggressive campaign of agitation and propaganda to condition people to get with the program.

It thereby sows the conditions for totalitarianism. We have no choice but to speak out in the face of its censorship. For more, see my talk at the link above. And let’s never forget that free speech is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition.

Public opinion is increasingly a reflection of what people are willing to say based on their sense of social rewards and punishments for expressing an opinion. (Graphic source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Social-media-communication.png )

If we revisit the example of the “quick public opinion shift” on same sex marriage — which was basically an implausible idea 15 years ago — we might ask: why did the activist push for it became so fast and furious? Couldn’t the idea withstand real public discourse and stand on its own merits without extreme public shaming of anyone who had doubts? Couldn’t it have come about through the legislative process without an activist judge overturning the referendum results of an entire state? Or Supreme Court justices claiming that those opposed were filled with “animus?”

The answer is a resounding “No.” In a previous post, I mentioned how availability cascades — opinion cascades, particularly on ideas that seem implausible — rely on a great deal of propaganda and agitation, through political correctness. They are very fragile things. The survival of such opinion cascades requires a lot of tweaking and teasing and discipline and balancing acts by those pushing them, including activists, politicians, celebrities, academics, media moguls. This is the way you get masses mobilized to pretend they’re impressed with a naked emperor’s new clothes. It’s all about conditioning.

The process has a limited life span, and must be applied to public policy before the window of opportunity closes. Polls actually showed that public opinion for same sex marriage had already peaked by the time the Supreme Court made it a done deal in the Obergefell decision last year. But we can’t really know what people believe when the environment for free speech on such an issue is so hostile that most who disagree would be loath to express it.

You may recall how Brendan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla, essentially for a thought crime. When activists discovered that Eich had made a private donation to the Proposition 8 referendum in California to preserve the legal definition of marriage as one-man and one-woman, they “outed” him and set him up for a virtual public hanging. The point was not only to get him to recant — which, to his credit, he did not do — but to warn the public that free exchange of ideas on this issue was forbidden.

Through propaganda and agitation, you get behavior modification on a mass scale. Yesterday it was same sex marriage. Today it is transgenderism. Tomorrow? It could be absolutely anything at all.

Last month I was on Vicki McKenna’s radio show discussing the effect that propaganda, specifically political correctness, has on us as individuals — how it isolates us from others as we silence ourselves out of the fear of being socially cast out because of our opinions. Vicki and I also discussed how political correctness affects society at large. By conditioning people into policing their own speech, political correctness cultivates a surveillance state in which people increasingly police the speech of others. I hope you’ll have a chance to listen. My segment starts at about 19:00 at this link:

“Availability cascade” is an academic term that basically has to do with manufacturing public opinion approval for a policy of some sort. Any kind of policy at all. In fact, think about how you might make an implausible idea seem plausible in public discourse, an idea no one ever even considered before. Next, think about how to create a public opinion “cascade” in favor of that strange idea. Availability cascades involve injecting a new idea into public discourse, which makes the idea more “available” to people to consider. If you saturate the media with praises for the idea, and add just the right celebrity endorsements, you may well get a bandwagon effect and even get a majority to go along with it. It can involve a lot of hype, but with political correctness it can also involve push back against those who don’t go along with the hype.

Let’s take an apolitical example of how an availability cascade might work. In the 1970s there was a silly fad called “pet rocks.” The pitch was that you didn’t have to feed or care for your rock, so it was the perfect pet! Below is a youtube video that revisits the sort of narrative that would have gone with the sale of pet rocks.

Obviously, the pet rock was just a marketing gimmick and a passing fad. The whole thing was tongue-in-cheek. But just imagine what might have happened if anyone who called the idea of pet rocks “silly” was labelled and publicly smeared in the media as a “bigot.” Repeatedly. Imagine if Hollywood made films seriously praising the merits and the heroics of pet rocks and cast skeptics as villians. Next, imagine if you could be fired from your job or socially shunned if you didn’t start talking respectfully about pet rocks and honoring them. My guess is that a lot of folks would start taking pet rocks very seriously, even if they privately found the whole thing ludicrous. They would refrain from passing judgment. They’d shut up about the silliness. Or, to gain public approval, they might express great admiration, just as the crowds admired the Emperor’s non-existent New Clothes. And with a surging opinion cascade and great public acclaim for pet rocks, everyone would “ooohh and aahhh” before them, enthusiastically praising them, and giving them a special protected place in public policy.

Sure this idea seems far-fetched. But we should consider how easy it is to get people to climb on board such a bandwagon. Because with certain propaganda tools and insights into human behavior, it’s far too easy to do that. Especially given a citizenry unaware of how propaganda affects them as individuals, which makes them even more vulnerable to psychological manipulation. There are many social psychologists (virtually all on the political Left) who study and measure the process of opinion cascades and how propaganda tactics can be used to tease out improbable trends. (One such trend currently is the saturation of the media with agitation and propaganda to get the population on board with the transgender project.)

So an “availability cascade” is a bandwagon effect in public opinion that can be teased out through just the right propaganda and agitation techniques. More next time. . .

Professor Lopez and I discussed the current unrest on college campuses. Why do so many students today seem unable or unwilling to engage other points of view? Why do so many feel the need to retreat to “safe spaces” whenever they encounter a word or thought that “triggers” negative emotions? Why are they so incoherent? So hostile? So blindly obedient to leftist agendas? So divorced from reality? To explore these questions, listen in!

Professor Lopez, author of Jephthah’s Daughters: Innocent Casualties in the War for Marriage ‘Equality’ has been targeted and harassed for the past several years by the LGBT lobby. This is not only because of Lopez’s stance against same-sex marriage, but because he has a compelling story of his own: He was raised by lesbians and identifies as bisexual. (He may also be the object of their scorn because he has been faithfully married to the mother of his children for 15 years.) The “diversity” bureaucrats at Cal State Northridge have worked tirelessly to concoct a case against Professor Lopez. The video clip below will give you a brief summary of Professor Lopez’s insights:

I offered “Ten Resources for Hack-Proofing Your Mind” in my Federalist article earlier this week, and I list them below. We need far more conversations about how political correctness – i.e., coercive thought reform – undermines our ability to think independently. We also need to understand that when we lose the capacity to think freely, our minds become extremely vulnerable to being manipulated. On a mass scale, this is very bad for any society.

The resources below can help us inoculate ourselves against the process of extreme undue influence or brainwashing . It’s a process that has no doubt affected the members of the death cult we call ISIS. We can see the dangerous effects of undue influence in various other cults as well. And we can also see that after decades of political correctness, coercive thought reform has become the order of the day on college campuses, coercing conformity among students. In fact, any student who simply wishes to be left alone to pursue studies can end up harassed, like those who were hounded by protesters in the library at Dartmouth recently. You can watch that incident here:

But I don’t believe those student agitators are really free agents. Their resentments have been so cultivated, and their access to diversity of thought has been so cut off, that they behave more like they have been mind-hacked by elites who have shamelessly recruited them for their own purposes.

The “safe spaces” that campus agitators demand really serve as little more than Pavlovian conditioning chambers that isolate them and guard them from exploring unofficial ideas. This way they are kept “safe” as fodder for demagogues and propagandists. What the students really need – what we all really need – are sane spaces where we can exchange ideas and develop friendships and goodwill.

A big part of the problem is that there has been precious little public understanding about the dynamics of coercive persuasion, and too little self-awareness about how vulnerable we all are to it. So I’ve prepared a very select list of materials that I think are well worth exploring. Ideally, people would consider these titles for book club discussions. For a summary of each entry, you can go to my Federalist article:

A while back, I posted a blog entry on the Marseillaise scene in the movie Casablanca. I feel compelled to run this entry again as we contemplate yesterday’s terrorist attack on Paris. Whenever we forget that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, we lose. Let’s never forget that, as well as the fact that our little acts of resistance add up, even if they may seem in vain. As Vaclav Havel pointed out in “The Power of the Powerless,” these acts of resistance have an illuminating effect. This is also very relevant as we contemplate the full frontal attacks on the First Amendment happening on college campuses these days. Below is my post from February 28, 2014:

After entry of the US into WWII, Warner Brothers released the classic Casablanca (1942) starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. One scene in Casablanca offers a magnificent juxtaposition with the Bavarian pub scene from The Mortal Storm (1940) discussed in the last post. The place is similar: another restaurant– Rick’s Cafe Americain. Also similar is a cast of Nazi officers, stirring up song (this one “Die Wacht am Rhein.”) But the similarities end there, when one man, Victor Laszlo, tells the orchestra to play the “La Marseillaise.” A thrilled and grateful clientele all rise spontaneously and triumphantly, drowning out the Nazis’ song.

Watch here:

If Laszlo hadn’t done what he did, what then? Chances are everyone would just sit around sulking. The Nazis would then stir up enough folks to sing along with them to the point that the Nazi narrative would seem the majority view. Morale would continue to plummet.

It’s the little acts of resistance that add up to make the biggest difference. These acts plant seeds in others, creating a cascade effect. Sad to say, it’s the power mongers of the world who seem to know this better than the rest of us do. That’s why they insist on our silence as a way station on their road to total control. So let’s not hide our light.

One of the latest targets of militant atheists is the Bladensburg World War I Veterans Memorial Cross pictured here. In my latest Federalist article, I discuss the lawsuit filed by the American Humanist Association that demands the removal of this monument which is also known as Peace Cross. I wrote it in anticipation of Veterans Day and I hope many in the Washington, D.C. area will attend the wreath-laying there on Wednesday. You can read my article here: Killing the Dead: Atheists Attack World War I Memorial.

It’s been standing there — at the crossroads of Annapolis Road, Baltimore Ave, and Bladensburg Road just outside Washington, D.C. — for 90 years. Two mothers of fallen soldiers broke ground for it back in 1922. On a bronze plaque at the base are the names of the 49 local soldiers who lost their lives in World War I. The monument is massive, but its size accurately and appropriately reflects the feelings of people in the aftermath of a war that was unimaginably massive and tragic (total casualities — dead and wounded, both civilian and military — was about 38 million.)

There are two basic themes in my essay: the impact of World War I and the symbolism of crosses. World War I was a cataclysmic event in human history that really set the course for so much of the violence of the 20th century, and the violence that continues to this day all over the world. And yet WWI is woefully neglected as a subject of study both in K12 public education and in higher education. So more than ever, we ought to preserve and respect our memorials to World War I, not tear them down! Second, the cross is basically a symbol of self-sacrifice. It has been recognized as a symbol of sacrifice in war memorials for a very long time.

We honor the fallen because of their self-sacrifice. If you are able to grasp that reality, then you understand the need for an effective symbol to express it. More than anything else, the Bladensburg Peace Cross is a symbol of self-sacrifice in keeping with the enormity and the calamitous history of World War I. No other symbol so efficiently communicates self-sacrifice and suffering. No other symbol serves also to signify the hope that the dead did not die in vain, that they laid down their own lives so others would live in peace and freedom.

Understanding the history and the purpose of memorials is key here. If the plaintiffs thought this through in a meaningful and sincere way, they wouldn’t be doing mental gymnastics with the First Amendment’s establishment clause in order to tear down the 90-year-old Bladensburg Peace Cross. Obviously, they have another agenda, which is to empty the public sphere of any and all religious imagery. In the end, this is not just a war on religion. It’s a war on history and memory.

Last May the Fairfax County School Board — at the behest of the Obama Administration — forced a policy promoting transgenderism on parents and citizens who showed up in droves at the meeting to protest it. This is the theme of my Federalist article today: “Ask Not Who’s Running for President, Ask Who’s Running for School Board.” Since school boards are local and nonpartisan elections, they tend to have very low level interest and can therefore end up in the hands of organized insiders with their own agendas. In the video below, you can watch at the 1:13:50 mark as one true representative of the people, Fairfax County School Board member Elizabeth Schultz speaks before the vote. (She’s not the one pictured in the frame. She was the sole vote against in the 10-1 “ruling” with one abstention.)

This school board meeting illustrates just how enormous the impact of local elections is on our lives. It’s beyond belief how little consideration people give them. So few of us know who our local representatives are. And yet it’s so easy to find them because they’re our neighbors! This feeds right into my blog’s theme about the power of personal relationships. And if we don’t watch out, local officials easily become cronies of the federal government, instead of tending to the best interests of the citizens.

Your child’s school curricula, public transportation, zoning, and “gun free zones” are just a few of the areas of local impact. So when citizens don’t engage — or if they’re totally preoccupied with the glitz of the national stage of the presidential elections — they end up allowing less responsive officials to take over locally. And in a one-party system, corruption finds its way in very easily.

Next week, on November 3 there will be local elections held throughout the nation. Will any take place in your community? If you don’t know, please find out! Learn about your candidates and get out to the polls and vote. And spread the word so that neighbors also go out and vote for good candidates. If you need to gather information, you can start with ballotpedia. Here’s a link for municipal elections: http://ballotpedia.org/United_States_municipal_elections,_2015 To get you started on finding information for school boards, here’s their page for the school board election in Fairfax County, Virginia: http://ballotpedia.org/Fairfax_County_Public_Schools,_Virginia One of the first things it notes is that there is currently a Democrat majority of 10-2 on that Board, based on endorsements. It doesn’t have to be that way. Though Fairfax County has been trending leftward for the past few years, it is nowhere near that lopsided in reality.

For County information you may have to dig a big deeper – into the website for your local paper or local “Patch” at patch.com perhaps. You can also learn more about your county leadership by going to the website for the National Association of Counties.

Here’s an excerpt from my article today:

All too often our local officials are elected by default. There is high turnout by insiders, and particularly organized get-out-the-vote efforts by teachers’ unions and others with power stakes in the local machines.

Conversely—and ironically—there is much lower turnout by ordinary citizens whose lives the elections most affect. And turnout in local elections has actually been plummeting, according to some recent research. . .

We tend not to pay attention even though many of us may intuitively understand that the decisions of our local officials have a far more direct impact on our lives than those of a federal government that can keep its distance. The trick is to keep local power local, and that means paying attention to who’s minding the store locally.